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Notes
1 Leonardo Boff, “Martyrdom: An Attempt at Systematic Reflection,” Concilium 163 (1983): 16.
2 “It is not the punishment, but the cause”—Non poena sed causa—that makes a martyr, Augustine explains, on multiple occasions. For example, in his letter to Dulcitius in 418: “I am busy, and I have refuted this type of empty speech in my many other little works. For I do not know how often I have shown in disputing and in writing that [the Donatists] are unable to have the death of martyrs because they do not have the life of Christians, since not the punishment but the cause makes a martyr.” Augustine, Epistulae, 204.4, ed. Alois Goldbacher, trans. Adam Ployd, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 57 (Vindobonae: F. Tempsky, 1911), 319; and “Non poena sed causa: Augustine’s Anti-Donatist Rhetoric of Martyrdom,” Augustinian Studies 49, no. 1 (2018): 26. For more on the cultural context of Augustine’s claim, see Ployd, “Non poena sed causa,” 25–44.
3 See Portland Interfaith Clergy, “Open Letter to Mayor Wheeler Protesting Police Brutality,” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J7auo23DHxFFRHb6RGKKHGIPvQhYC_zMOr9SDA6dzMo/edit. See also Yonat Shimron, “In Portland, This Rabbi Leads the Clergy Resistance,” Religion News Service, July 23, 2020, https://religionnews.com/2020/07/23/in-portland-this-rabbi-is-called-to-lead-the-resistance/.
4 See Emily Green, “Rabbi Ariel Stone Leads Portland Congregation in Fight for Social Justice,” Street Roots, September 15, 2017, https://www.streetroots.org/news/2017/09/15/rabbi-ariel-stone-leads-portland-congregation-fight-social-justice.
5 See Thomas Fuller, “How One of America’s Whitest Cities Became the Center of B.L.M. Protests,” The New York Times, July 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/us/portland-oregon-protests-white-race.html.
6 See Sergio Olmos, Mike Baker, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, “Federal Agents Unleash Militarized Crackdown on Portland,” The New York Times, July 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/us/portland-protests.html. Federal agents were from Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Coast Guard.
7 See Zolan Kanno-Youngs, “Were the Actions of Federal Agents in Portland Legal?,” The New York Times, July 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/us/politics/federal-agents-portland-arrests.html; Robert Evans, “What you Need to Know About the Battle of Portland,” Bellingcat, July 20, 2020, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/07/20/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-battle-of-portland/; Shawn Boburg, Meg Kelly, and Joyce Sohyun Lee, “Swept up in the Federal Response to Portland Protests: ‘I didn’t know if I was going to be seen again,’” The Washington Post, September 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/investigations/portland-protesters-federal-response-trump/.
8 Black bloc is a tactic engaged by a group of people (not, as some mainstream media presumes, a group in and of itself) of cladding oneself in black and covering one’s face, in order to conceal one’s identity and make it more difficult to distinguish between people in a protest setting. The tactic of black bloc emerged from radical anarchist activists in response to violent state oppression in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. For more on the history of black bloc, see Daniel Dylan Young, “Autonomia and the Origin of the Black Bloc,” A-Infos, 10 June 2001, http://www.ainfos.ca/01/jun/ainfos00170.html.
9 See Chris McGreal,“‘I Wanted to Take Action’: Behind the ‘Wall of Moms’ Protecting Portland Protestors,” The Guardian, July 21, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/21/trump-federal-agents-portland-protests-moms; “Portland Raging Grannies,” https://portland.raginggrannies.org/.
10 See “Portland Interfaith Clergy Resistance,” https://linktr.ee/picr.
11 Shimron, “In Portland, this Rabbi Leads the Clergy Resistance” (see n. 3).
12 Boff, “Martyrdom,” 15.
13 The man in the wheelchair, Dustin Ferreira, was charged with interfering with a peace officer, disorderly conduct in the second degree, and menacing. See Portland Police Bureau News Release, “Officers Assaulted During Unlawful Assembly in Kenton Neighborhood,” September 29, 2020, https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/news/read.cfm?id=261231&ec=1&ch=twitter. The woman, name unknown, was arrested immediately after asking the officers why they were whispering and to share their notes with the class. A video of this exchange is available on journalist Alissa Azar’s twitter, https://twitter.com/AlissaAzar/status/1310846884106231808.
14 At least, insofar as Wikipedia and Google are indicative of contemporary common parlance. For those of us who grew up evangelical in the 1980s and 1990s, there was also the contemporary continuation of Foxe’s work, compiled by the popular Christian band dc Talk and the non-profit organization, Voice of the Martyrs. See John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1537), https://www.ccel.org/f/foxe/martyrs/home.html; and dc Talk and Voice of the Martyrs, Jesus Freaks, Stories of Those Who Stood for Jesus: The Ultimate Jesus Freaks (Tulsa: Albury Publishing, 1999).
15 In Revelation 2:13b (NRSV), Antipas, a convert from paganism, is spoken of as “my witness [mártyrs], who was killed among you, where Satan lives,” and Revelation 6:9 references “the souls of those who have been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony [mártyrian] they had given.” See “The Martyrdom of Polycarp” and Ignatius of Antioch, “Letter to the Ephesians,” in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. and trans. Michael W. Holmes (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 298–333 and 182–201, respectively.
16 See Anthony Harvey, Richard Finn, and Michael Smart, “Christian Martyrdom: History and Interpretation” in Witnesses to Faith? Martyrdom in Christianity and Islam, ed. Brian Wicker (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 33–48.
17 Jan Willem van Henten and Friedrich Avemarie, Martyrdom and Noble Death: Selected Texts from Graeco-Roman, Jewish and Christian Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2002), 3.
18 Diane Shane Fruchtman, “Martyrdom as Sacrificial Witness,” The Immanent Frame, 3 September 2019, https://tif.ssrc.org/2019/09/03/martyrdom-as-sacrificial-witness/. Jolyon Mitchell offers a brief outline of the origins of martyrdom, and notes that initially, mártys (and its verb form, martureo, “to bear witness”) “were not inextricably connected with being a ‘blood witness’ in other words, bearing witness by giving up one’s life.” Jolyon Mitchell, Martyrdom: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 22.
19 Fruchtman, “Martyrdom as Sacrificial Witness.” Here, Fruchtman is citing the third century North African poet Commodian (Instructiones, 2.18.16–17, translation hers). See also Diane Shane Fruchtman, “Living in a Martyrial World: Living Martyrs and the Creation of Martyrial Consciousness in the Late Antique Latin West,” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2014, in which she explores this phenomenon of living, sacrificial, martyrdom.
20 Augustine, Sermo 260E, 2, cited in Fruchtman, “Martyrdom as Sacrificial Witness” (see note 18 above).
21 Fruchtman, “Martyrdom as Sacrificial Witness.”
22 “Martyrdom does not consist in dying or sacrificing oneself for a cause,” Fruchtman explains, “rather, it comprises having one’s representation subsumed into a larger ‘truth,’ the realities, multiplicities, and infelicities smoothed away and subordinated in the service of representing that truth. Thus, martyrdom necessitates sacrifice, but not in the literal, death-centered ways we commonly assume. It is, in effect, the narrative subordination of a character to a cause, accomplished through various manipulations of observing, testifying, and enacting witness.”
23 Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the College de France, 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2.
24 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 331, emphasis mine.
25 Foucault, The Courage of Truth 11.
26 Foucault, The Courage of Truth 332
27 Sharon Lerner, “Federal Agents Used Toxic Chemical Smoke Grenades in Portland,” The Intercept, 10 October 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/10/10/portland-tear-gas-chemical-grenades-protests/.
28 M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 81. Copeland contrasts the baselia tou theou, the reign of God, with pax Romana, empire. “Given the Location and Conditions of Bodies in Empire,” she writes, “the virulent global persistence of racism, xenophobic reactions to ‘illegal’ or undocumented anti-bodies within the body of empire, the bodies maimed and slaughtered in wars mounted by clients of empire, the bodies done to death by AIDS and hunger and abuse and, above all, that body broken and resurrected for us, theological anthropology can never cease speaking of bodies… [and it] must protest any imperial word (anti-Logos) that dismisses his body and seeks the decreation of human bodies,” in Copeland, Enfleshing, 57. In a similar vein, Boff speaks of martyrs as engaging in a “liberating faith-praxis, inspired by passion for God and for the poor whom God loves” in Boff, “Martyrdom,” 14.
29 Aquinas, 2a.2ae. Q. 124. art. 5, cited in Boff, “Martyrdom,” 15.
30 Boff’s claims about martyrdom in many ways echo and build on the notion of “anonymous Christianity” developed by Karl Rahner, who Boff had studied under at the University of Münich. Rahner argues that “even outside of the Christian body, there are individuals—and they are to be found even in the rank of atheists—who are justified by God’s grace and possess the Holy Spirit,” Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. XIV (New York, Seabury Press, 1976), 291.
31 Boff, “Martyrdom,” 15.
32 Boff, “Martyrdom,” 15.
33 Boff, “Martyrdom,” 14.
34 Gary Potter, “The History of Policing in the United States, Part 1,” Police Studies Online, Eastern Kentucky University, June 25, 2013, https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united-states-part-1; Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2001); Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920’s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018); Federal Bureau of Investigation, Counterterrorism Policy Directive and Policy Guide, April 1, 2015 (updated November 18, 2015), 89. See also Michael German, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement,” Brennan Center for Justice, August 27, 2020, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law; K.B. Turner, David Giacopassi, and Margaret Vandiver, “Ignoring the Past: Coverage of Slavery and Slave Patrols in Criminal Justice Texts,” Journal of Criminal Justice Education 17, no. 1 (2006): 181–195; David Cunningham, Klansville, U.S.A: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-era Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Finally, it is relevant to note that in the 1920s, the state of Oregon had the highest per-capita Klan membership in the country. Photos in the local paper from the time show the Portland police chief, sheriff, district attorney, and mayor, posing with Klansmen, with an accompanying article highlighting how these local leaders were taking advice from the Klan. See Alana Semuels, “The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America,” The Atlantic, July 22, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/racist-history-portland/492035/.
35 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 10.
36 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 11.
37 Meg Kelly, Joyce Sohyn Lee, and Jon Swaine, “Partially Blinded by Police,” The Washington Post, July 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/07/14/george-floyd-protests-police-blinding/.
38 Christoph Koettl, Nilo Tabrizy, Muyi Xiao, Natalie Reneau, and Drew Jordan, “How the Philadelphia Police Tear-Gassed a Group of Trapped Protestors,” The New York Times, June 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007174941/philadelphia-tear-gas-george-floyd-protests.html.
39 Sarah Sicard, “Federal officers in Portland break former Navy Seabee’s hand,” Military Times, July 20, 2020, https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2020/07/20/federal-officers-in-portland-break-former-navy-seabees-hand/.
40 See Michael Safi, Caelainn Barr, Niamh McIntyre, Pamela Duncan, and Sam Cutler, “‘I’m Getting Shot’: Attacks on Journalists Surge in US Protests,” The Guardian, June 5, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/05/im-getting-shot-attacks-on-journalists-surge-in-us-protests.
41 See “2020 Police Brutality,” https://2020pb.com/. Unsurprising to those who live and protest here, Portland, Oregon ranks number 1 on the list of cities with the most police brutality incidents during protests, overall (422, New York is a distant second with 118) and when adjusted/100k resident (64.6, with Brooklyn Center, the Minneapolis suburb where the trial for Derek Chauvin, the man accused and ultimately convicted, of killing George Floyd, coming in second at 42.4), (https://twitter.com/r2020PB/status/1391843245207040007?s=20).
42 Kim Barker, Mike Baker, and Ali Watkins, “In City After City, Police Mishandled Black Lives Matter Protests,” The New York Times, March 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/us/protests-policing-george-floyd.html.
43 Cornel West and Osagyefo Sekou, “And the Young Ones Shall Lead Them: The Ferguson Rebellion and the Crisis in Black Leadership,” Ebony, October 2, 2014, https://www.ebony.com/news/and-the-young-ones-shall-lead-them-the-ferguson-rebellion-and-the-crisis-in-blac/,emphasismine.
44 It is interesting to note here that, while those engaging in in Black Bloc are often critiqued for obscuring their identities, one effect of such a tactic is it decenters the individual. Also, one objection to this proposed framework of the protestor as martyr may be that protestors are actively resisting, whereas the martyr is one who passively suffers in the face of persecution. In his essay “Dimensions of Martyrdom: A Plea for the Broadening of a Classical Concept,” Concilium 163 (1983): 9–11, Karl Rahner argues that a death undergone after active struggle should also qualify as martyrdom. Rahner points out that “the death Jesus ‘passively endured’ was the consequence of the struggle he waged against those who wielded religious and political power. He died because he fought,” Rahner concludes.
45 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 332.
46 Boff, “Martyrdom,” 16.
47 Lizette Larson-Miller, Sacramentality Renewed: Contemporary Conversations in Sacramental Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 125.
48 Mazin Sidahmed, “‘She was Making Her Stand’: Image of Baton Rouge Protester an Instant Classic,” July 11, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/11/baton-rouge-protester-photo-iesha-evans. The impact of the image even inspired an ill-advised Pepsi commercial, where Kendall Jenner walks up to a row of police officers at a protest, to what appears like it will be a similar stand, and then proceeds to hand a police officer a can of Pepsi, which he accepts, setting off cheers of approval from the other protestors and an appreciative grin from the officer. After significant and swift backlash, Pepsi pulled the commercial from the airwaves. See Daniel Victor, “Pepsi Pulls Ad Accused of Trivializing Black Lives Matter,” The New York Times, April 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/business/kendall-jenner-pepsi-ad.html.
49 Geoff Herbert, “Man Shoved by Buffalo Police Identified; Celebrities Call for Cops to be fired,” Syracuse, June 5, 2020, https://www.syracuse.com/state/2020/06/man-shoved-by-buffalo-police-identified-celebrities-call-for-cops-to-be-fired.html. Gugino is a long-time peace activist with connections to the Catholic Worker movement.
50 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 43–45. Bonhoeffer lays the scene for his exhortations on the call to discipleship, presenting the “struggle today…for costly grace,” over and against the cheap grace that “is the mortal enemy of our church.” Whereas cheap grace is “grace as bargain-basement goods, cut-rate forgiveness, cut-rate comfort, cut-rate sacrament,” costly grace is “the hidden treasure in the field, for the sake of which people go and sell with joy everything they have.”
51 I am grateful to David Farina Turnbloom for the evocative and apt connection between Gugino’s interaction with the police officers and the parable of the Good Samaritan.
52 Francis, Fratelli Tutti, Encyclical Letter on Fraternity and Social Friendship (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2020), ¶ 65. This small section raising questions about who embodies the role of the Good Samaritan draws from similar writing I have done on this broad topic. See Brandy Daniels, “The Antifa Activist as the Good Samaritan,” Religion and Its Publics, October 29, 2020, http://relpubs.as.virginia.edu/the-antifa-activist-as-the-good-samaritan-by-brandy-daniels/.
53 Francis, Fratelli Tutti, ¶ 82.
54 Francis 83.
55 Jennifer M. McBride, Radical Discipleship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 23. See also William Cavanaugh, Torture and the Eucharist (New York: Oxford/ Blackwell, 2008); Charles L. Campbell, The Word Before the Powers (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002).
56 See Andrew Wymer, “Introduction: Liturgy as Protest and Resistance,” Liturgy 35, no. 1 (2020): 1–2. In the introduction to the issue he guest-edited, Wymer asks six questions, the last being: “How might protests be understood to constitute a ‘liturgy,’ and how might that liturgy critique, inform, or provide alternates to formally recognized liturgy?” While it served as one of the entering, orienting questions, none of the essays in the issue address the question directly.
57 Liturgy, leitourgia (λειτουργία) translates from the Greek as “public service” or “work of the people” (from the roots laos [λαός] “the people,” ergon [ἔργο] “work”). For more on the history and definition of liturgy, see Frank C. Senn, The People’s Work: A Social History of the Liturgy (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006); Anscar J. Chupungco, “A Definition of Liturgy,” in Handbook for Liturgical Studies: Introduction to the Liturgy, vol. 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), 3–7.
58 The 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests against China’s overreach into Hong Kong government resulted in over 10,000 arrests, over 2,000 reported injuries, and at least two deaths. The Belarusian protests against the increasingly undemocratic regime of Alexander Lukashenko that began in May of 2020 and are ongoing as of the time of this writing has resulted in over 32,000 arrests, 1,000 injuries, fifty missing, and at least four dead. The 2021 Myanmar protests in opposition to the coup d’état by the Tatmadaw, known locally as the Spring Revolution, has thus far led to over 4,000 arrests, untold injuries, and over 800 deaths.
59 Boff, “Martyrdom,” 15. In a similar vein to Boff, a recent essay in America in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the death of Catholic priest and anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan, his long-time lawyer and friend, Joseph M. Cosgrove, writes that “In Dan’s eyes, all humanity was a sacrament.” He continues, reflecting on how, for Berrigan, “That is where we find the sacraments—on the street, with the people.” See Cosgroves, “In the Eyes of my Friend Daniel Berrigan, All Humanity Was a Sacrament,” America: The Jesuit Review, May 9, 2021, https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/05/09/dan-berrigan-joseph-cosgrove-sacrament-240613.
60 Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001), xiv.
61 Chauvet, The Sacraments, 115.
62 Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 2. See also Chauvet, “Functioning of the Structure: Symbolic Exchange,” in The Sacraments, 117–154. I am again grateful to David Farina Turnbloom for drawing my attention to Chauvet’s sacramental theology and its relevance for this essay.
63 Chauvet, The Sacraments, 58.
64 In an essay that considers the relationship between liturgy and ethics in Chauvet’s work, Bruce Morrill writes that Chauvet’s account of the sacraments challenges the “constant temptation to understand faith as the ‘sacralization’ of certain objects, places, and personages rather than the ‘sanctification’ of daily life through practices of justice, liberation, mercy, and forgiveness.” Continuing, Morrill explains that Chauvet situates this temptation “in a pervasive resistance to ‘the bitter scandal of a God crucified for the life of the world’” (137, cf fn1). See Morrill, “Time, Absence, and Otherness: Divine-Human Paradoxes Binding Liturgy and Ethics,” in Sacraments: Revelation of the Humanity of God: Engaging the Fundamental Theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet, ed. Phillippe Bordeyne and Bruce T. Morrill (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 137–152.
65 Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, “The Clergy’s Place is with The Protestors in Ferguson,” Aljazeera America, November 23, 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/11/ferguson-protestmovementreligious.html.
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Brandy Daniels
Brandy Daniels is assistant professor of theology and gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Portland, Oregon. Her work stands at the intersections of constructive and political theologies, ethics, and gender and sexuality studies.